TWO more 5G mobile phone mast have been targeted in West Belfast in the past week.
Last Thursday a new mast was destroyed on the Glen Road, followed by another mast attack in Beechmount the following night. By our calculations that brings the number of masts set ablaze in the West of the city to over 20 in the past two years.
Who’s behind the attacks? Nobody knows. Why are they doing it? Nobody knows. But we can hazard a guess that it is some conspiracist who has gone down an internet rabbit hole and now believes the masts cause cancer. Or Bill Gates has midget agents hiding inside them. The masts have no doubt provided a vital new interest for those who have had their Covid conspiracy fix taken away from them.
The person or persons behind the attacks have become more and more brazen and taken to setting the mobile phone masts alight during the long hours of summer daylight. The number of attacks have also increased significantly. This suggests that he or she, or they, are becoming more erratic, more bold, more addicted to the thrill of what they are doing.
But as more and more people are finding that their phone calls are dropping out in mid-conversation, as witnessed in our vox pop in today’s paper, the calls are increasing for the PSNI to get the finger out and find who is behind these juvenile but debilitating attacks.
Earlier this year, Sinn Féin carried out a survey to explore the extent of mobile phone signal blackspots in West Belfast on the back of the mast attacks. Remarkably over 2,600 people responded to the survey, with people complaining that they had missed GP and hospital appointments; families couldn’t keep in contact with vulnerable older people; while others are losing out on interviews for jobs.
If the person or persons behind the attacks are doing so for health reasons, because they believe the 5G masts do cause cancer, how can they square this with the knowledge that so many people’s health is being harmed by missing out on important medical appointments? And one can only hope that he or she can get a clear signal if a family member is unfortunate enough to need the emergency services.
In the meantime, we say to the PSNI: these people are not Napoleons of Crime; there is no Mister Big among their number, be that number large or small. Rather, they are clearly amateurs, egotists and thrill-seekers – and therein lies the frustration with the police’s complete failure to apprehend the guilty. The new mast on the Glen Road, for instance, was clearly a prime target for the mast-burners – an irresistible tethered goat attraction that could and should have been exploited by those tasked with finding the culprits. But the arsonists approached this grade A target in broad daylight in complete confidence and with complete immunity. The lack of arrests tells us that the mast was fitted with neither alarm nor CCTV.
Amateur hour, it seems, is spreading.
